America. They may work in a school cafeteria, or as an aide to a home demonstration agency, or help build a community water system, such as the one the Reverend Billy Graham and Sargent Shriver visited recently at Blevins Creek in North Carolina. In January of this year, 52,000 rural young people were enrolled in Neighborhood Youth Corps, receiving wages of $2.8 million per month. This represents 31.6 percent of the total NYC enrollment.

The work experience program under title V of the Economic Opportunity Act is reaching into hundreds of rural communities. Forty percent of all funded training spaces have been allotted to rural America. Since the inception of the program, almost $50 million in work experience funds has gone into projects in the 182 poorest counties in the Nation.

Nearly one third of the volunteer strength of VISTA is in rural areas, with more than 1,000 volunteers assigned to 135 projects in 34 States. Many of these volunteers are helping develop a sense of community in isolated and unstructured rural areas, preparing the groundwork for future community action agencies.

Through the OEO program of rural loans, administered through the Farmers Home Administration, nearly $80 million has gone to 37,900 low-income families and 740 cooperatives. These loans are financing investments in farming and about 350 different types of nonfarming enterprises. The money is going to rural people who could never have qualified for a loan before. It is giving them an opportunity to become self-sufficient and to rise out of poverty.

These are some of the statistics concerning the broad range of OEO self-help programs in rural America. I think they give evidence that we are not dealing with an invisible population, but one that to us is very real, and whose problems we take very seriously.

It might be of interest to this committee to hear in detail about just one of the rural community action agencies-what it does, how it is organized, what it has accomplished.

I would like to tell you about the people who live in Breckinridge and Grayson Counties in northwest Kentucky and the Rough River Area Council Community Action Agency which was organized by the people of these counties 2 short years ago.

From the outset, the people from Breckinridge and Grayson Counties set three goals for their CAA: To meet the human needs of the community, to build up an economic base, and to create community facilities. Two-thirds of the members of the CAA board are themselves poor people, most of whom had never had experience in directing any kind of an organization.

Today, the residents are involved in 20 community organizations, each with a committee composed of equal numbers of low-income people, business people, community leaders. These commmunity action. committees send delegates to serve on two overall boards, and they also determine what activities will be most useful in their own communities.

One program, which has created a high degree of community participation, is a sewing class. But it's not an ordinary kind of sewing class. The women make clothes for their own families and sew for the other people's children, too. The CAA and the schools have set up a

clothing bank for needy school children. With funds from title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, they have bought quantities of fabric directly from the mills, and the sewing centers produce clothes for the clothing bank.

The centers are housed in buildings belonging to the community organizations and the classes are taught by volunteers. The CAA director had the machines donated by a local company and procured furniture through Government surplus.

In a little crossroad settlement, called Yeaman, very much like what you would find in any rural area, 130 families got together and planned to establish their community center in an old school building. But the schoolhouse burned down.

The committee then made a decision to build a new center. And eight men signed a note for purchasing cinderblock and other materials. The men of the comunity built the center, still not sure how or where they were going to pay for it. Then, at a meeting of the community action. agency, they came up with a most unique plan. The neighborhood leaders at the Yeaman sewing center began making old-fashioned sunbonnets and the bonnets were put on sale in the gift shops in Kentucky State parks. Now they have entirely paid for the community center and have bought additional land for a baseball diamond and basketball court.

Business people and representatives of other government agencies are deeply involved in the community action program in the Rough River area. Many of them work with the CAA development foundation, which has already brought three new industries into the areacreating jobs for 700 people. The development foundation has helped 63 people get loans from the Small Business Administration. One of these loans went to a meatcutter who now has his own plant for cutting and packaging meat for freezers, and employs four men.

A group of businessmen serves as an advisory committee working with the CAA economic developer, and provides support for the SBA borrowers by giving them management advice, going over their accounts with them, and teaching them good business practices. The CAA has provided leadership and staff assistance in getting a number of grants from other Federal agencies. These include:

Two planning grants from Housing and Urban Development: A 36-unit, $654,000 public housing project in Irvington, population 1,500;

A 40-unit, $800,000 rent supplement housing project from Federal Housing Administration, in Cloverport, population 1.350. The community action program has been active in the creation of water systems in the area. It is tied into the operations of other agencies in the two counties, and provides special assistance for many of their activities. It pays for aides working in the welfare offices, and nurses' aids in the health departments, in order to increase the effectiveness of those services. It has assigned NYC youth to work in a number of county offices. It has obtained equipment-usually Government surplus-for the community centers and for the two youth centers run by the local community action committees in each county. When the Vocational agriculture department of the high school wanted to teach students how to repair trucks, the CAA obtained 16 trucks for the boys to tear down and overhaul.

Lee Taylor, the director of the Rough River program, makes a point of telling people that the CAA is not a welfare-type program. He says he operates on the philosophy that: "We don't do it for you-you do it for yourself.”

That, briefly, is the story of one community, and what a community action program has meant to it. The Rough River story is being multiplied several hundred times across the land.

This progress has been made where poverty is most prevalent. The rural people of this country constitute only 29 percent of the total population, but they have 40 percent of all the poverty in the country. Mr. RESNICK. If I may interrupt right there, these percentages are very misleading, because in actual fact the total number of people who live in rural areas constitute far more poor people than shows on the surface. In other words, you have to work that out. We get different figures, I might add, from different sources. If we say 30 percent are the rural people, taking 200 million as the total population, that would be roughly 60 million people; is that correct?

Mr. HARDING. Yes, sir.

Mr. RESNICK. We are talking about 60 million people living in rural America.

Mr. HARDING. Right.

Mr. RESNICK. We understand more than 50 percent of those 60 million people are poor.

Mr. HARDING. Our figure is 40 percent, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. RESNICK. Forty percent of all the poverty in the country. So, they have 40 percent of 200 million, which is 80 million.

Mr. HARDING. No. I think that figure relates to the poverty figure, around 32 million, Mr. Chairman. Forty percent of 32 million, which is around 13 million.

Mr. RESNICK. You say there are 13 million poor people in this country now?

Mr. HARDING. No, sir. I said there were 32 million poor, and 40 percent of those are rural.

Mr. RESNICK. So, we have 13 million poor people out of a total population of 80 million?

Mr. HARDING. Sixty million.

Mr. RESNICK. In other words, roughly 25 percent.

Mr. HARDING. Yes.

Mr. RESNICK. In other words, roughly one out of every four persons living in rural America is poor

Mr. MONTGOMERY. At the poverty level, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. RESNICK. As compared to one out of how many in the rest of the country?

Mr. HARDING. One out of seven.

Mr. RESNICK. One out of every four in the country, and one out of every seven in the cities.

Mr. HARDING. There is, obviously, a greater concentration in rural

areas.

Mr. RESNICK. There is quite a disparity when you put it that way. When you get figures like that rather than percentages, you see much more clearly the problem that we face in rural America.

Mr. HARDING. We certainly agree there is a problem. There is not only that problem, but as I have alluded further in the statement there

is the fact that the dispersion of that population represents a very real problem in efforts on our part and the part of the Department of Agriculture to cope with it. It is not just a statistical problem. It is also a geographical problem.

Mr. RESNICK. I understand that, but so that our colleagues and the rest of the Congress and the people of the United States can understand-if you carry it one step further it is roughly twice as prevalent in the rural area as it is in the city area. In other words, the odds of a person's being poor in the rural area are twice as great as in the city

area.

Mr. HARDING. About in that area; yes, sir.

Mr. RESNICK. It is roughly 2 to 1. It could be worked out to a closer percentage, but I would like the record to show that per thousand people you have twice as many poor people in the rural area as in the city area.

Mr. HARDING. One-third of the poor in rural areas reside on farms. Two-thirds are nonfarm rural people and some of these small rural communities which have depended on farming, lumbering, or mining, are literally withering away.

In 1960, a million and a half rural families were living in housing so dilapidated as to be a menace to health and safety. Another 31% million lived in homes which needed major repair. Where four out of five urban housing units were in sound condition and had plumbing, only one out of two rural homes could meet these criteria.

More than half of the rural housing units in 1960 were in the South, and less than half of these were structurally sound and had complete plumbing.

Nearly 50 percent of older rural families lived in homes that needed repair. Eight out of the nine rural housing units occupied by nonwhite families required improvement or plumbing, or both.

Poor schools keep rural people abmost 2 years behind urban people in educational level. For urban youth in 1960 the dropout rate was 25.8 percent in central cities, 23.7 in all urban areas. For rural youth, it was 33.4 percent. In 1961-62, there were still 13,000 one-teacher schools, nearly all rural. In the Plains, 46 percent of all elementary schools were one-teacher schools. In the Rocky Mountain area, the figure was 27 percent.

Compared with urban areas, rural areas have far less than half as many physicians and nurses per 100,000 population. Rural people are much farther from medical attention-particularly hospitals-than urban people. Rural residents make 11 visits to dentists for every 216 visits by metropolitan residents. Expenditures for hospitalization are higher for such families because less free care is available for them.

To overcome these conditions, to reverse them and create new prospects for rural America, is the challenge of the rural community action program. In each of the more than 600 CAA's, the situation is different and the solution will be different, but all share the characteristic problems which have nurtured rural poverty.

This is a big order in rural areas where, as I have said, capabilities are underdeveloped and leadership is still untapped. The CAA must energize the community. It must be able to pull into the community all the programs and services for which the community can qualify.

There is no reason why urban communities should have the lion's share of programs-except that up to now they have had the capability of getting them quickly, and the rural programs have not.

Of course, there are exceptions to this-like Rough River, and like the Elk River Association program in Tennessee which has made masterful use of a wide variety of programs to help its people. By and large, however, rural communities still have much to learn about planning and programing and administration.

We expect within the coming year to step up our work in this direction. Already we have given preemployment training to 150 rural community action technicians in our center for the study of poverty at the University of Wisconsin, and have trained other staff at a series of workshops at the University of Missouri. In each of our seven regional offices, we will shortly have a rural specialist to focus on problems of the rural programs. Simplified forms for grant applications and program management, now being formalized, will make it easier for rural CAA's to handle the paperwork of the program. A corps of rural specialists is now being set up for intensive assistance to CAA's which are not strongly staffed.

Technical assistance will be provided to the areas where the 50 new rural community action agencies for fiscal year 1968 are being developed-areas to be identified on the basis of greatest need. Additional technical assistance will go into building quality into existing CAA's.

The problem of income improvement, or economic base, is common to many rural communities. CAAs are approaching it in a number of ways. Many are conducting manpower training programs, such as the farm workers program in the Northwest Regional Opportunities CAA in Missouri, which trained 190 men. LBJ & C Development Corp. in Tennessee has placed 342 men workers in on-the-job training in its five-county area. In Neosho, Mo., men have been trained in the technical skills needed for water and sewerage systems.

CAP agricultural programs have proved useful as income improvers in some communities; to name a few, vegetable production and marketing in the Chattahoot chee-Flint CAA in Georgia; range management in the Laguana Pueblo Council in New Mexico; Operation Pickle in Anoka County, Minnesota; a small farm improvement program in North Carolina involving 1,500 people; and a livestock production and marketing program in the Lincoln Hills CAA in Indiana, involving 100 families in Crawford, Harrison, Perry, and Spencer Counties. Mr. RESNICK. If I may interrupt at this point, I would like to know what these people are doing which is so clearly a function of the Department of Agriculture in these cases. I always had been under the assumption that the Department of Agriculture handles this, certainly that the Extension Service handles it.

Mr. HARDING. These are really in the nature of extensions of and experiments in programs that the Department of Agriculture has not yet undertaken.

Mr. RESNICK. Why have they not undertaken them?

Mr. HARDING. I would not want to say these are completely unique in that regard, Mr. Chairman, but in these particular cases the Community Action agency desired to undertake these programs. These are locally designed, locally initiated programs.